


don't turn back now that we're here

by Haberdasher



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Bad Things Happen Bingo, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Gen, Homesickness, Light Angst, Major Original Character(s), Not Used to Freedom, Original Character(s), Original Character-centric, POV Original Character, Pokemon, Pokemon Fanfiction, Pokemon Journey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-21 15:07:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21076904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: Eden, a teenage runaway from Slateport newly arrived in the city of Uberrime, struggles to find her bearings in the big city and begins to wonder whether she should have left home in the first place.Written for the prompt "Not Used To Freedom" in Bad Things Happen Bingo.





	don't turn back now that we're here

It had all seemed like so much fun at first, when Eden had arrived in Uberrime, all on her own save for Pascal and Maximus (who she could claim were named after philosophers and emperors if pressed to come up with fancy justifications that her parents or people like them would approve of, but honestly, they were named after Disney sidekicks, names befitting the Disney princess that she liked to imagine herself as) by her side. A whole city to explore, all on her own, with no curfew, no chaperone, no monitoring devices, nothing but her imagination to limit her travel...  
  
...but that had been some hours ago, before the sun had started to set.

Exploring a huge city on her own was all well and good in theory, but in practice... Eden was beginning to realize that she knew a lot less about Uberrime than she thought she had known.  
  
Sure, she could come up with solid guesses about the town's population as of the last census or its most common exports or what famous tourist attractions it has or other things that got listed in almanacs and textbooks, but actually _navigating_ the place? On foot no less, lugging around a heavy suitcase and two rambunctious Pokemon all the while? She was pretty close to clueless.

(One could easily argue that Eden didn't _need_ to have both Pascal and Maximus out at all times, didn't need to spend the energy and effort it took to wrangle them as she walked from street to street.  
  
It would make sense, sure.  
  
But Pascal and Maximus were the ones who had inspired this trip in the first place--or, at least, had gotten her to turn vague ideas of leaving home and heading out on an adventure of her own into an actual plan that she could implement--and she wasn't going to imprison them in their Poke Balls the first chance she got. She wanted them to be free now, too, just as free as she now was.  
  
Plus, they'd spent a while cooped up in their Poke Balls on the ride over, as she'd hidden them away for fear that the two of them could be too obvious a tip-off as to her actual identity. They deserved a little time to stretch their legs... though that wasn't the best maxim in Pascal's case, she supposed... but still. They deserved some time out in the open.  
  
The last thing Eden wanted was to be _cruel._) 

Eden had managed to find a place to eat while meandering the streets of Uberrime, luckily, but she had no idea whether the price she had paid for a decent meal was fair or not.  
  
Dealing with money had never been her business before. Her parents had always been the ones to handle that... no, that wasn't quite right. Her parents' _assistants_ had always been the ones to handle that. But the point remained.  
  
The most Eden had ever done was window shop at the Slateport Market every so often, when she'd been able to talk her parents into it (with a clear schedule and monitoring devices to make sure she didn't deviate too severely from it), and she wasn't sure if the prices there were normal for Hoenn, or perhaps bumped up a bit due to it being a bit of a tourist trap, let alone how prices in Hoenn would compare to prices in Ho'ohiki...  
  
It didn't _seem_ like they were ripping her off, but how could she _know_? 

And now it was dark out, with only a few dim rays of sun peeking out from the few spots where it could be seen between all the buildings, and it was starting to get cold, and... Eden didn't know where she was going to go, how she was going to spend the night.  
  
A hotel would make sense, she knew, or some variation thereof (like a motel, or a hostel... despite what her business suit might make it appear, she didn't much care if it was fancy), but she didn't know where any were in Uberrime. And there, too, she was worried that she'd get ripped off, that strangers would take advantage of her lack of knowledge and charge her way more than they should for a place to stay. She had no idea what hotels usually cost! And while she'd taken a good chunk of money with her when she'd left home, that's all she had to live off of for the foreseeable future...

  
Honestly, though, as Eden kept meandering through the streets of Uberrime, hoping to find a hotel to no avail, she stopped caring so much about the price and started thinking that she'd pay _anything_ to find a safe place to get some rest. 

In the back of her mind, Eden was starting to wonder if she should have just stayed at home.  
  
Back at home, it had seemed horrible to be stuck inside the building for the indeterminate future, pacing back and forth through the same few rooms and reading the same few books and going through the same few actions day after day, with no clear future in sight, no obvious purpose for all this "schooling" that her parents insisted upon her having rather than letting her go out on a Pokemon adventure like other kids her age (or several years younger, at this point) often did...  
  
...but now that home was nowhere in sight, far across the ocean, she missed her room, her bed, how she was always warm and safe and comfortable (physically, at least) there. Even if it all seemed boring and pointless, was that really so bad? 

Her feet never ached like this back at home, where she rarely got the opportunity to go further than the far reaches of her parents' mansion.  
  
She never shivered like this back at home, where the thermostat was one of the few things Eden _did_ have control over--when her parents weren't home to override her use of it, anyway, and that was the case more often than not--and worst case, she could always burrow into her bed and be soft and warm under a nest of blankets and stuffed Pokemon. (Eden hadn't brought a single stuffed Pokemon with her, worrying that doing so would seem childish and thinking that it was unnecessary when she had the real thing by her side, but now... now she missed every single one of them.)

And Eden worried about being cruel to Pascal and Maximus by not letting them out of their Poke Balls, but exposing them to the cold and forcing them to go block after block after endless block in search of a hotel that they might never find... in a way, Eden supposed that might be being cruel to them, too.  
  
Her parents had said they'd let her keep them, after all. That had been their one concession to her, when she'd come to them with dreams of adventure and freedom and exploration.  
  
They could be by her side back at home, too, safe and warm... and trapped, like she was, she supposed, but... what was the lesser evil here?

What was she _doing_?  
  
She was wandering through the streets of a strange city, with no idea what she was going to do besides hoping to find a hotel for the night (and what if she didn't, what if she had to sleep on one of those cold dirty benches outside all night?), dragging two innocent Pokemon along with her, all for the sake of some vague dream of having a life that meant more than it did being cooped up at home?  
  
Why did she even bother? 

And what if something even worse happened to her?  
  
What if she was wandering into the bad part of town without even knowing it?  
  
What if someone found her out on the streets of Uberrime in the middle of the night and killed her just because they could? Or she froze to death out on one of those city benches? Or she got some kind of nasty superbug and got so sick that she'd die before she could make it to a hospital?  
  
Would anyone ever find out?  
  
Would her parents ever know what had happened to her?

All these fears and more were probably running through their minds right now, too, come to think of it. Eden's parents were probably worried _sick_ about her.  
  
She'd never seen them worried before--annoyed or frustrated or disappointed, yes, but never worried--but now she tried to imagine it, tried to picture what her parents would look like worrying about her.  
  
It wasn't a pretty picture, that much was for sure.

But what would happen if she went home now, really?  
  
Eden doubted her parents would let her keep Pascal and Maximus after running away with them, and she didn't want to lose them; even if she was still getting to know them, she valued their companionship, valued having them by her side even when it took some work to keep them there.  
  
She'd probably lose those rare trips to the Slateport Market, too.  
  
Bars over her bedroom window, maybe, since that's how she had escaped before.  
  
Every little bit of freedom taken from her, just to make sure that she wouldn't pull the same stunt again...  
  
Was losing all that freedom really worth the comforts of home? 

Eden saw the word "Hotel" glowing in the distance, and she sped up as best she could with her suitcase and her Pokemon in tow, though at this point she was half-expecting it to be her imagination or another kind of false alarm...  
  
...but no, as she approached, it became clear that somehow, she really had managed to stumble upon a hotel. One that looked a little shabbier than the ones her family would stay on during their (very rare) family vacations, admittedly, but it would certainly do in a pinch. 

As Eden walked into the hotel lobby, she was still weighing her options in her mind, weighing the price of freedom versus convenience. It was a difficult decision, to be sure, and one that could change her life for good...  
  
...which is one reason Eden was very glad to get out of the cold and the wind and the dark and collapse on one of the plush chairs in the hotel lobby as she thought.  
  
Difficult decisions like this one were best made when one could focus on thinking rather than on petty inconveniences, after all.

After a few minutes of quiet contemplation, Eden got up from her plush seat and walked over to the front desk of the hotel, her mind made up for good.  
  
The obstacle of actually _speaking_ with the hotel's front desk employee, however, still remained.  
  
Eden didn't really know how to people. She'd never really gotten the chance. Oh, she'd interacted with servants and tutors and very occasionally her parents, but that was different. This was a stranger, in a strange place, with a dynamic in place that wasn't one Eden had ever had to deal with before.  
  
As such, it took a minute for Eden to gather the courage to actually say what she had decided to say. 

For a moment, Eden considered what would happen if she just told the hotel employee the truth. If she said that her name was Elizabeth Theodora Lancaster (even if that name had never seemed to fit quite right), if she said that she had ran away from home back in Hoenn, if she said that people were looking for her (people _had_ to be looking for her) and that her parents were worried about her (her parents _had_ to be worried about her) and that she needed to go home right now.

If Eden did that, she could go home, reunite with her parents, have her life go more or less back to normal (or normal for her, anyway), lose the burdens and responsibilities that came with freedom and go back to living in the lap of luxury, albeit behind lock and key.  
  
It would be so easy.  
  
But... no, that wasn't right. Eden knew there had to be more to life than being stuck inside a mansion for years on end, and she wasn't going to stop before she'd had her fill of adventure, no matter how many minor inconveniences she had to face along the way. 

So instead, Eden told the front desk employee, with a smile on her face (that wasn't entirely genuine, but she'd learned the art of the polite smile long ago), "My name is Eden Quinn, and I'd like a room for the night, please."  
  
She'd read in stories how people seemed to adapt easily enough to using false names, but hadn't been sure how much to believe it. But now, Eden embraced the name that she had only come up with a few days beforehand. Not only had she already adapted to using it, it felt right, somehow, in a way that the name Elizabeth Theodora Lancaster never quite had. It felt natural. It felt _comfortable_. 

And as the conversation continued, as the front desk employee began to discuss the different kinds of rooms available that night and how much each one would cost, as Pascal and Maximus noisily played in the background as they enjoyed all the amenities that the hotel lobby had to offer, as Eden thought of how the future was hers and hers alone now, slowly but surely, the smile on Eden's face grew more and more real.


End file.
